Overwatch Ladder Climbing Life Style Guide By: Holyxel

Hello my fellow heroes, my name is Xel and today I will present you with a different kind of Overwatch ladder climbing guide. As much as this game focuses on team work, mechanics, and aim, your emotional state and health will equally affect your performance. As Athena and Winston agree, a healthy body is a healthy mind. Fyi I’m low Diamond so I guess this guide would apply to those below and at Diamond.

1) Exercise!

Okay now that half of you have left this guide, let me explain. I’m not talking about hardcore six pack gym routine 7 days a week. I’m talking about movement. Get your ass off the couch and move around. Do it for 15min. No gym equipment, mats, or weights? No problem. You know how to do jump jets? Great! Now do that for 3min. You know how to do squats? Awesome! Also do that for 3min. Lift your arms in the air straight above your head, and stretch! Repeat that. Do push ups and planks for 1min. Can’t push yourself all the way up? That’s fine, you can cheat. Grab a chair, climb onto the chair, climb back down, rinse and repeat. You got stairs? Walk up and down the stairs 10 times. You got dishes that you didn’t do? Go wash them, this warms your hand, helps blood circulation. Exercise also makes you happy, provide you with energy, and boost your alertness. Do the above small movements before your game night!

Q: “oh but <insert pro here> looks like a sponge and still fragging” —A: Yes, but you are not a pro, you didn’t spend 10000hrs of your life playing Overwatch at a hardcore level, so to catch up, you have to improve all aspect of yourself to make up for that shortcoming! This means waking up your brain and your body!

2) Fluid!

Preferably H2O aka. WATER! Have a glass of water beside you, and a bottle filled with water for refill. Put them in a safe place so you don’t spill over your keyboard. Make sure you are hydrated. Dehydration can make you cranky. You also cannot feel dehydration until a certain point so don’t wait until you are thirsty to drink water. Drink after every round ends, drink after every match. Coffee or tea are okay too, my favourite is milk tea with a little honey. Alcohol is not recommended, I don’t know about you but I can’t aim for sh*t and plays like a potato when I drink alcohol. Drinking fluid also makes you less likely to be hungry, reducing instances of snacking, thus making you less fat long term!

3) Posture!

Make sure you are sitting upright, don’t slouch. Sitting upright requires more effort, keeps you alert, and gives your arm and shoulder greater freedom to move. This means you can move easier, and thus faster, and in turn translates to reaction in game = better mechanics overall. Put a pillow between the back of your chair and your back to prop yourself up.

4) Pick TWO!

Pick 2 characters you want to play, and you love to play. You might like their animation, their voice, their abilities. Pick two that you are willing to commit in competitive games. That you’d have fun with, even if you lose, that you are willing to learn with. For me, these are Junkrat and Mercy. Don’t bother with the two character per category kind of thing. Garbage flex is still garbage. And unless you play 16 hours a day, you won’t have the ability to truly learn all 8 of characters (two from each category). Don’t flex into things you can’t perform well. In order to climb, you need to be slightly above average in the character you play, so make yourself slightly above average in those two characters. When in game, you can either auto lock into one of those two characters, or wait and fill one of those two characters, only those two. So for me, I pick Junkrat. If he is taken, I pick Mercy. Or if we have no healers, I’ll Mercy. That’s it. If both are taken, I type and negotiate.

Do NOT check people’s profiles. Knowing a mercy main on your team is playing dps will only tilt you. Knowing your Hanzo has a 22% win rate will make you angry. Knowing an enemy is masters last season will only make you nervous and under perform. Useless information is useless information. Don’t look, don’t think into it, focus on yourself.

Next is communication. This depends on your personality. Do you get tilted easily? Do you find some random person’s voice annoying as fu*k? If so, mute voice and move on. Avoid anything that can agitate you. If you are agitated you won’t be coordinated, so no amount of communication will fill in that gap. Mental state is #1, even if you have to stop yourself from hearing anything.

Also, sure call outs are nice, but in order to climb, you need to be independent. You need to practice your hearing, to identify ults and which direction they are coming from, the foot steps etc. You need to practice memorizing timing, and you need to practice adaptation and quick maneuvering when someone or yourself makes an opening in the enemy team for a play. You need to practice seeing, your peripheral vision needs to be widened. You need to be sensitive to sound and movement and everything going around you. You need to pick up all that on your own, in time, without someone yelling at you like “IMA GRAV!!!”, no, you see your Zarya move up, you follow, you know it’s coming, he doesn’t need to say, you just follow up. Learn to make plays based on plays, not voice.

Next up, if you need to climb, you are probably in someway needs improvement. Talking can distract you from your own play. Focus on your own play, stop talking and play properly.

7) Tracking!

For every win, in your performance tracker, write down one thing you think you did well that is GAME CHANGING. For every loss, in your performance tracker, write down one mistake that you made that is GAME CHANGING. Don’t write random stuff that feeds your ego, such as “I killed 3 people on the point” well did you take the point on that push? Nope, so that’s not really game changing is it? Really think about the previous match, how everything played out. Think about what you did that changed the tide of something. This help you calm down between matches.

8) Pause Between Matches!

Now that you have filled out your little tracker for the match. Count from 5 to 1 on screen, then queue. Between the time you write things down and counting, this should help you dodge previous match team mates. It’s best not to queue into the same people, even if you won with them. Since winning teammates make you overconfident, and losing teammates tilt you. If you have lost two matches in a row, go to the bathroom. No I don’t care if you don’t need to go, you probably could use it. Go to the bathroom, run your hands in warm water. Drink water, and come back.

9) Tally-Up Your Tracker!

After 50 matches or so, tally up your wins and loss from your tracker. Inside, you will see statistics of which day/hour of the day you tend to win more matches. Try to play more competitive on the days you have high win rate and play qp/death match to practice on days that you are losing. Everyone has a biological schedule to themselves based on their own work/school and life balance. Your sleep cycle, eating schedule, commuting schedule all effects your mental state and how you perform throughout the week. It’s not really that you are better on the days that you have high win rate. It’s the fact that knowing you have high win rate on those days give you confidence and thus more focus so in turn you get a free morale boost and tend to win more matches. You need to manage your mental state, and to do that using statistics to trigger your confidence will help.

At the same time, you need to focus on the things you need to improve. Check the map statistics and see which map you perform poorly on with your two tricking characters. Go online, search up VoDs, and see how similar players perform on those particular maps. Don’t fall into the bullsh*t excuse of “this character suck at this map whatever”. You need to learn to adapt. In order to climb you need to be able to deal with difficult match ups and come on top. You need to deal with bad maps and learn to adapt. When watching Vod, focus on their movement, how they dodge things, how they position, how they time things. Put in the effort to research and learn from others.

10) Don’t Give Up!

There will be some days you will hate the two characters you picked to main because you can’t win or can’t get kills or can’t do anything. Don’t give up. You need to master something instead of spreading your effort far and thin. It takes a bit of stagnation for the next point of shoot off. You need to be able to hold out through this stagnation without giving up, a lot of people do, and then they come to this forum to complain. Climbing actually requires quite a lot of hours. You can’t win every match, don’t beat yourself up over it. You are not garbage, you are a champ. As the famous Obi-Wan quote, “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” Be a champ, fight on!